Introduction:

I've been playing Minecraft since the first release, but I only realized that there were, in fact, data packs. I immediately fell in love with world generation data packs and how one minor change in the game's code can make the game feel wholly different. A simple replacement of a block makes the world golden, or it makes it so that there are pigs in the place of every single leaf block in the game for every single tree that there is! I learned, studied, and made several world generation data packs for me, my friends, and the public while playing and toying around with the Minecraft world generation code that SlicedLime (the Minecraft developer of world generation) released. But everything has changed with the cave update. Mojang completely rewrote the world generation system, and it felt like all my previous studies went down the drain like nothing, and I had to start re-learning how world generation works with each new release of Minecraft. They changed so much that I could barely stand my ground with the new world generation settings. Back in 1.16, if I wanted jungle trees in a savanna biome, I just added as few as 5 lines of code into the savanna biome, and poof, there were now extra jungle trees in the savanna biome. If you wanted end cities to generate or mansions in the nether, you could do so just as easily as the previous method did. It was simple and easy, with very few limitations. Even someone like me, who has an absolutely terrible affinity for coding, could enjoy himself. With 1.18, they removed this. If you want to add blue orchids to a biome, forget it. The game will crash. You'd like nether biomes to exist in the overworld? Nope. Crash. You'd like to add some color to cold oceans, and you'd want some coral to generate it. Nah. As soon as you tell the game that there are corals in cold ocean biomes, it'll crash. I really despise this new, overcomplicated, highly limited world generation that Mojang has implemented with the 1.18 cave update. It made my work much less enjoyable and much more frustrating, with very little sense of achievement.

What does the data pack do?

Honestly? Not much. You won't notice pretty much anything if you're a layman. Well... except for the new underground biomes that now can generate above ground. Yeah, sorry about that. That wasn't intentional. For some reason they now do generate above ground just as any other biome does. That was an accident. But the main goal of this data pack was to bring back the old kind of world generation. Not in the sense of gameplay but mechanics. Before 1.18 the game used as few as a few hundred, maybe even fewer lines of code to tell the world how and what sort of biomes should it generate. However, all that changed with the cave update. Now the game generates the very same biomes with the few new ones with as much as 200.000 lines of code! That's absurd. Can't even get my head around that. I can't work with that! I cannot easily modify that or change any of that! That's way too much! This data pack tries to make the world generate pretty much the same way as before but with as few lines of code as possible so me and maybe a few other inexpert, clumsy ones can get a sense of what is exactly going on in the data pack, then modify it according to their imagination. Now the game generates mostly the same biomes, mostly the same way but with 1423 lines of code instead of the default 205030.